Astral Nomads

One man, one woman, one rabbit......traveling with the stars.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Rosewell to T or C

The Nomads are back. We've been out of range of WIFI for almost 6 days, so here's a short post, picking up where we left off. You might remember, we were hunkered down in Roswell NM and not feeling all that well. The good news is we're all better now. We've been camping at Elephant Butte State Park near Truth or Consequences NM for the last 5 nights. It's very dry and dusty here despite the presence of a lake. I pretty much feel like I've been eating spoonfuls of sand.

The drive from Roswell to the campground was pretty amazing, with multiple changes of landscape: prairies. mountains, canyonlands, a near-ghost town named Lincoln, a huge field of volcanic boulders named the Valley of Fire, and the birthplace of Smokey the Bear. It was about a four hour drive from Roswell to the campground and neither one of us was feeling all that great at the time so these are shots that Astral Wendy, trooper that she is, took from the van windows. When we got to camp, it was basically a set-up and crash scenario. Astral Wendy went to bed almost immediately and I think I nodded at about 5pm. We'll follow up in our next post on the campground and the local flora and fauna. Hint: jackrabbits and quails galore!

We got high prairies...

...dry treeless hills....

...crags. Or is that a butte?

Occasionally a small ranch. 

If you need a sheet metal silhouette of just about anything,
stop just outside of Lincoln NM and they'll be sure to hook you up.






This was in the Valley of Fire. Hard to tell from this photo, but
it was just huge chunks of black volcanic rock as far as the eye
could see. There was a recreation area there but it was hard to see
exactly what you could do there since the landscape was so rough it
didn't even look like a hiking trail was possible.

There's a lot of color in the desert but you have to look for it.


Even the Interstate (25) cuts through some crazy terrain.

In a lot of places we've been, the Interstate doesn't look all that 
different from New Jersey. This isn't one of them.

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